Digital Content Growth Sparked by the 2016 Presidential Elections

The 2016 Presidential Race will not be forgotten soon. The race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was hotly contested, and at the end it was Trump who was victorious.

As soon as Clinton and Trump were officially confirmed as the democratic and republican nominees, respectively, U.S. voters were anxious to see the two on the stage together. The first presidential debate on September 26 between the incumbents was the most viewed debate ever with over an estimated 88 million households tuning in to watch Clinton and Trump mix it up. To put that into perspective, the highest viewed sporting event was Super Bowl 50 earlier this year with 112 million viewers. Never has there been a more controversial presidential battle, and it was this back-and-forth that had captivated the US audience. However, the date of the first debate coincided with the hugely popular Monday Night Football, which meant many households had to DVR (most likely HDD-based) one of the events to watch later.

Additionally, there have been tens of millions of Tweets, re-Tweets, Snapchats, Instagrams created just because of the presidential race. There is no way to measure exactly how much new digital content was created due to this year’s presidential race, but it had to have been sizable. And although only a fraction of the new content is probably actually stored, at the end of the day, this year’s presidential race was good news for storage device companies. So, for the sake of HDD and SSD companies, let’s hope that the 2020 presidential race is equally captivating but maybe with little less controversial candidates. Perhaps that interest will push us beyond the 44 zettabytes of created data expected in that year!